I did that (distracting subtitles) on one of my videos and it had a very negative response. I won't do it again, but I was puzzled because I find it much nicer than the traditional subtitle format personally. It's easier for my brain to focus on. (And no one in my test audience minded.)
Subtitles are very explicitly not something you're meant to engage with or focus on which is why people hate it when you make the subtitles more "engaging" than the content of the video. If you want people to focus on your subtitles, you should write a blog instead of make a video.
Subtitles are an accessibility feature. They are meant to stay out of the way and add to, not detract from the video content. They are meant to be subtle and only visible if you need to look at them.
I love the liquid glass look and have helped multiple non-techie people install the developer beta just because they were excited to experience "the frutiger aero update". (frutiger aero is a bit of a meme on tiktok right now so that might be why.) It's fun to hate on apple and the ridiculous level of glass on the control center was pretty funny, but I do think they knocked it out of the park with this one, in terms of mass appeal.
The one issue is that everyone on the beta says their phone is slower now. Which is probably not because of the liquid glass effect, since I think that should be doable with just a couple of texture lookups. (One of those funny things about computer graphics is that often the most visually impressive effects are the simplest computationally - compare this to a "proper" gaussian blur, which is quite expensive.)
Each glass layer is something like 5 shader layers, all of them running something different than a basic alpha blend, looking up content from close to far away. Those "couple of texture lookups" (more like a dozen, if you add the filtering) add up pretty fast, also to be able to look up textures, you need to render each of the textures in a distinct buffer, and so on.
Saying this won't tax the battery is ridiculous. And if it was for something "impressive" I might see the ROI.
But it's a basic UI control. A button, a slider. And it's not impressive, it's distracting. The whole idea of glass in UI is to make a control less apparent. To make it fit with the content, blend in, be less distracting. But when light rapidly bends and twists behind in the refraction, the effect (in motion) is more like "STOP LOOKING AT YOUR CONTENT, LOOK AT ME".
This is... I don't know what the exact opposite of good design is. It's not "bad". Bad is not knowing what you're doing. This looks intentionally done to be as terrible as it can be, with laser-sharp malice.
I remember when Microsoft was ensuring us all Vista won't tax the performance of the computer, it's all hyper-optimized, don't worry about it. And theirs was a much simpler glass effect. What happened then? Windows 7 simplified the effect for performance reasons, and Windows 8 and 10 completely removed it, because it was too heavy...
Use common sense. Liquid Glass is more difficult to compute due to the refraction and "global illumination" effects, and it's running on tiny power starved devices. Even a DAMN WATCH. How is that supposed to magically not matter?
Who lost? Everyone who got laid off wouldn't have had at a job at all if they weren't hired, and they probably got severance packages for more than the average American makes in a year.
> Everyone who got laid off wouldn't have had at a job at all if they weren't hired
Maybe I've been lucky, but every time I've been looking for a job I've had AT LEAST two options.
People move cities, sell houses, buy houses, give up apartments, plan their finances, and plan their career around their job all the time. Investing a year learning the ropes at a company, finding ways to fit into the structures, etc. only to have the rug pulled out from under you just as you're starting to get the hang of things...
> and they probably got severance packages for more than the average American makes in a year.
Maybe I've been unlucky, but I've never had a job where my expectation of a severance package was anything more than 2-4 weeks wages.
> Maybe I've been lucky, but every time I've been looking for a job I've had AT LEAST two options.
You got many offers precisely because a lot of companies were (over)hiring. And the fact that you had many options on the table allowed you to get a better compensation (either because you negotiated, or because everyone else did so the industry standard increased). You benefitted from these hiring binges.
When that was the case, I saw a grand total of 0 complains by tech workers that tech companies were hiring too much; it benefitted them immensely but that did not translate in any article praising CEO for taking these risks.
Could these companies keep on these workers ? Many can ! But a hallmark of good governance is having a budget and taking care of your expenses.
At your household level, you can probably afford to pay for Netflix, Disney+, HBOMax and Amazon prime at the same time. And maybe you did during COVID because you were watching TV more.
But now that you are back to doing more "real life" things, you maybe don't need them all. It's not that you risk being evicted because you can't pay rent; you are probably still saving a bit of money every month. But that is not a reason to not ask yourself "do I really need these all now ?" and if the answer is negative, to do something about it like cutting one or two. What is someone then told you "But look, you can currently afford all these streaming services ! You should keep paying for them all for as long as you can, and since you have them, make sure you reorganise your life to schedule some time to watch them all !".
Can we stop using the household budget analogy for megacorps, governments and economies? It’s overly simplistic and wrong.
(For just one example, a household has a single non-varying income stream and everything else is expense. Large companies have many revenue making depts, lines of business, products, etc)
> People move cities, sell houses, buy houses, give up apartments, plan their finances, and plan their career around their job all the time
Then those people are naive. I never plan my life around an employer. I plan my life around my employability. I wouldn’t move somewhere that there weren’t other jobs in the area. Well now I wouldn’t work at any company that wasn’t fully remote
>I wouldn’t move somewhere that there weren’t other jobs in the area.
While a good principle, I'll posit there are a lot of more or less specialized professional jobs--especially at more senior levels--where you can't just walk across the street and slide into a similar role at a different company. Even if it's in the same general area, a 2 hour commute each way is probably not sustainable.
And thats why I have a 25 year of paranoia about being overly specialize.
Yes I’m self aware enough to understand the irony of the only reason I fell into my role at $BigTech at 48 years old is because I did become overly specialized in enterprise dev + cloud.
It's hard not to be at least somewhat specialized as a very senior person.
If you're an embedded systems programmer, maybe you can hack on some Javascript but no one is probably going to pay you very senior comp to do junior programmer work.
It is certainly true you don't want to be too specialized in general. You didn't want to be the Y2K guru in 2001 or the world's expert in performance optimization for some specific computer architecture that isn't manufactured any longer.
When I took my current job, there were probably a few companies in the general area that would have been somewhat obvious potential matches. But it was sheer coincidence that the one I connected with first through a connection happened to be the closest major tech company to my house.
Is that really true though? How many of the 2.7 million developers in the US are just your generic enterprise CRUD developer writing apps using Java, C#, etc? They are basically interchangeable and for most of my career, I could throw a resume up in the air and get multiple offers for yet another generic enterprise CRUD job.
On the other side, how many jobs are (were?) available to the generic software engineer who could do the DS&A monkey dance (junior/mid) and “design Twitter” and talk about “scope” and “impact@ in STAR format (senior).
There are not “millions” of people being laid off. Unemployment is still at a historic low. It’s mostly the tech sector. I’ve been through this type of economy at least three times - 2000, 2008, and for a brief second 2020.
Even back in 1996 when “having mine” meant making $33K a year as a hybrid computer operator/programmer, I saved aggressively. Again, I was 22 years old and had enough sense to be paranoid about depending on one specific job.
If you feel like this, you shouldn’t take a job that can’t guarantee in writing that they will keep you for X number of years. If you took a calculated risk and took the job anyway, well that’s on you.
> If you feel like this, you shouldn’t take a job that can’t guarantee in writing that they will keep you for X number of years.
Those jobs don’t exist. If there are they are such a minuscule number of openings it is not worth thinking about them.
> If you took a calculated risk and took the job anyway, well that’s on you.
Let me break it to you: almost everyone works because otherwise they would go hungry, loose their home and die in sad circumstances. People who don’t are statistical anomalies.
Are you saying that by having the misfortune of not being born independently rich and working basically any job the poster “took a risk” which is “on them”?
> Are you saying that by having the misfortune of not being born independently rich and working basically any job the poster “took a risk” which is “on them”?
He is saying that. Its the Puritan Christianity's mentality of blaming the poor for not working hard. Repurposed into the modern free market capitalist ideology where its used to blame the ills of the system on the victims - "You havent worked hard enough" "You werent smart enough" etc...
This is nonsense because the people that were laid off at Google (as one example) were not selected by their tenure or having been hired during pandemic or during the remote phase, nor was it based on performance reviews.
People who had been there 12, 13, 16 years; people who had been just promoted. People who were senior management. People who were engineers. People who were on mat leave...
Management there effectively fed people's employee numbers through a random generator. And people who (IMHO naively/foolishly) gave their lives to the company suffered.
Decisions to overhire during the pandemic impacted people who had nothing to do with that decision. And not just because of the layoffs, but also because the company growth during that period was so intense that it led to onboarding and project mgmt difficulties as well.
But my experience when working there is that there are definitely people whose emotional (and physical) engagement with their jobs goes well beyond just what is required to get that compensation.
> Everyone who got laid off wouldn't have had at a job at all if they weren't hired,
Incorrect. Many of those people already had a job when the moved to Amazon/Microsoft/wherever.
Since no one makes a horizontal movement, all the roles they vacated when moving where lower roles. And this argument goes recursively when the old company fills those roles.
This means that most people who did not have a job prior to the hiring explosion and had a job after the hiring explosion, had low-paying jobs, in very low roles.
Right now they're immature, but I'm hopeful that advancements in ZK-tech will allow practical ZK-rollups. ZKSync already has a zk-evm testnet running (which I believe is based on zk-llvm), so we're close. Currently all the big rollups have master keys which can be used to steal all the money deposited by them, but there's no reason in principle they have to have this. Polygon has permissionless rollups, so I'm quite hopeful that they'll be a viable trustless permissionless scaling solution soon.
The crypto(graphy) is rarely the weakness in these situations, so declaring faith in (insert new tech buzzword here) is almost certainly not going to be the answer. It comes down to operational and human factors, like poorly written code. (new tech buzzword) will involve lots of new code, and why do people think this time the new code will be error-free?
In this case, the weakness was that the keys that controlled the bridge were somehow stored insecurely. When attackers gained access to the keys, they were able to steal from the bridge. In a properly-implemented rollup, there are no keys to secure, so this attack vector is ruled out.
But more broadly, there is really nothing else with the same security properties as a smart-contract-enabled cryptocurrency. Paypal will delete your account any time they want, Visa and Mastercard will blacklist whatever industries they feel like blacklisting, etc. If you want a system that's decentralized and where these attacks aren't possible, you have no alternative. The problem is that current blockchain-based systems can only handle a certain number of operations/second while remaining decentralized. The appeal of scaling solutions like ZK-rollups is that they give us the same security properties as the main chain without any security compromises (relative to the main chain). That's all conditional on their code being correct, but given that there's such a large payout to hacking e.g. bitcoin or ethereum or zksync and it still hasn't happened, we can guess that the coders have done their jobs well and such problems are at least very difficult to find.
You are misinformed. With most cryptocurrencies (except Monero) it is very easy to blacklist wallets, and since tx history is public you can't just move your coins to a new address to get around it either. You don't actually even need decentralized systems for private transactions, digicash with blind signatures would be private and vastly more efficient.
I think "very easy" is relative. How do you get the whole world to agree to participate in the blacklist (or even to be aware of it)? If you don't, then obviously it will remain possible to tumble/launder the coins.
By comparison, if PayPal decides to freeze your account, that's it, the end, those funds are frozen unless and until you successfully run the corporate supplication gauntlet.
You don't need the whole world, just the exchanges. And and some ERC20 tokens can have addresses frozen by a central authority (ex. USDC and Circle, USDT and Tether, etc) which is why the attacker immediately sold the USDC for ETH on 1inch and Uniswap.
I think what gp means is to tell all the exchanges (and maybe merchants) to blacklist your wallet. Not as simple and bullet proof as PayPal freezing your account but similar.
The community has had a fix for all of these problems just over the horizon for a decade. It just isn't coming.
The real issue is that most of the crypto being held is held by people who don't care about using it as currency or for anonymity, they're using it as an "investment". That's why when coins that work better as cash or privacy or whatever come out, nobody cares, they just keep trucking on with bitcoin. All they care about is that the value of bitcoin goes up.
Anyone can make anything which supposedly “works better as cash”.
How will they create confidence in the money, though?
In addition, please bear in mind aluminium and copper are more _generally useful_ than gold.
We cannot state, therefore, a money’s usefulness is more important than the hardness of the money: i.e. its scarcity and resistance to fundamental change.
This is likely why most competing currencies these days claim to be “decentralized”. It’s really just their way of claiming hardness without openly admitting to such.
The nice thing about zkrollups is that users have a cryptographic guarantee of being able to withdraw their money. The rolled-up transactions are posted on chain in compressed form, and a contract on chain verifies a concise proof that all the rules were followed, including that all transactions had valid signatures.
So if this is done correctly, any master keys shouldn't be able to steal user funds. The key holders would be the ones authorized to post the data, but the worst they could do is censor transactions.
Right. It's possible to conceive of a rollup, particularly a zk-rollup, without anything like a master key. But current rollups do have those keys. ZK-sync for example has two, one used mostly used for upgrading the smart contract that has a 14-day withdrawal delay (or something like that) and one for use in case of emergency that has no withdrawal delay. If the second were compromised, it would lead to all the money stored in the rollup being stolen. But there's no reason in principle that either of these are necessary.
ZK-rollups are awesome because they don't introduce any trust assumptions (except for the master key issue, which is just an implementation detail). The only risk is current zk-rollup designs is that they could censor certain transactions by never including them in a "batch" (the rollup equivalent of a block), but with unpermissioned rollups like the one I think Polygon has even this issue is mitigated
This has been the difficult bit for the ecosystem, and I think grasps at what GP is saying. For every competent dev/cryptographer in the space, there are 10(0) who are not because there’s so much money floating around. Those 10(0) may implement zk-class protocols incorrectly and end up in the same situation we see today. There is promise in but a ton of validation/maturation to do for zkrollups in the wild.
I’m curious about handshake vs ens. The thing I like about ens is that it’s on ethereum which should make it harder to 51% than handshake (which is a relatively small PoW chain iirc). Of course with ethereum you need to pay gas fees which are out of this world (I paid $55 gas for my ens name). I’m hopeful that in the coming years ens will be able to reduce fees by partially transitioning to an L2 once zk-L2s mature, but we’ll see
True. It made me feel like microanalyzing one of their comments. Here goes:
On:
> What I couldn’t find was a sober, dispassionate explanation of what crypto actually is — how it works, who it’s for, what’s at stake, where the battle lines are drawn — along with answers to some of the most common questions it raises.
They left this comment:
> No technology is "sober" or "dispassionate" in its creation, nor is it neutral or apolitical, and thus anyone who is claiming to view it from that perspective is DEFINITELY selling you something.
First of all, no one said anything was sober or dispassionate in its creation. And it's trivial to come up with a sober and dispassionate explanation of many technologies, even political ones. I'm certain I can find a sober and dispassionate explanation of how Israel's Iron Dome functions if I really wanted to. And second, if you have a definition of "political" that's so broad that it includes literally every technology, it's not really a very interesting statement to say that some technology is political, right?
You can explain on a technical level how the Iron Dome fulfills it's functions. You cannot explain it's social and economic ramifications without talking politics.
Most of the arguments in favour of cryptocurrencies and blockchains focus on these economic and social factors (decentralised economy, NFTs for selling ones art).
The technical merit of blockchain gets discussed so often, the outcome is always either "existing technologies solve this problem better" (which makes discussing the technical merit outside of a academic context futile) or "look at these economic and social improvements this technology provides" (which puts you squarely back into the political discussion).
